Adapted from the Swedish bestseller by Stieg Larsson, this is a surprisingly disappointing thriller. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and couldn’t.
1. The plot is made complicated by poor storytelling but is actually very simple: a journalist (Daniel Craig) and a young, troubled computer hacker (Rooney Mara) investigate a girl’s disappearance from 40 years ago, uncovering the secrets of a wealthy family.
2. It’s highly stylised, but the aesthetic seems deliberately ugly.
3. It’s unnecessarily violent: the scenes with Mara and her abusive social worker seem completely gratuitous. She could have filled in her backstory as dialogue. Did we really need to see it?
4. Something about the story doesn’t ring true. I never believed in the characters or the main relationship between Craig and Mara. In fact, there’s no chemistry between anyone.
5. The film seemed too impressed with its own tech. There are way too many shots of laptops being typed into. There are also too many shots of Mara riding a motorbike.
6. It’s unevenly paced. One unexciting scene in which Mara researches in a library seems to go on forever. But then the “action” (and there’s very little of it), is oddly rushed.
On the plus side, Daniel Craig is always watchable. But unfortunately that isn’t enough. Maybe the original Swedish film from 2009 is better.
